The Building of Ningirsu Temple
Gudea CylindersThe seven stones surrounding the house are there to take counsel with its owner. Its chapel for funerary offerings is as pure as the clean abzu. The stone basins set up in the house are like the holy room of the lustration priest where water never ceases to flow. Its high battlements where pigeons live is ... Eridug ... E-ninnu offers rest to pigeons, it is a protective cover with large branches and a pleasant shade, with swallows and other birds chirping loudly there. It is Enlil's E-kur when a festival takes place in it. The house's great awesomeness settles upon the whole Land, its praise reaches to the highlands, the awesomeness of the E-ninnu covers all lands like a garment.
Ezekiel 43:2
1 Then he brought me to the gate that faced toward the east. 2 I saw the glory of the God of Israel coming from the east; the sound was like that of rushing water, and the earth radiated his glory. 3 It was like the vision I saw when he came to destroy the city, and the vision I saw by the Kebar River. I threw myself face down. 4 The glory of the Lord came into the temple by way of the gate that faces east.
Notes and References
"... Ezekiel’s final chapters, dazzling in their graphic description of the divine majesty re-establishing residence in the magnificent re-sancti˜ed precincts of a rebuilt temple, conclude with an unmistakable allusion to fertility and abundance (47:9–12). In notably parallel circumstances, Gudea’s temple-building occurs toward the end of the seventy or eighty-year domination of Sumer by a people known as the Gutians. The Gutian invasion, described in the Sumerian lament, “The Curse of Agade,” resulted in dire famine for Sumer, with “misery, want, death and desolation thus threatening to overwhelm practically all ‘mankind fashioned by Enlil’.” After these decades of oppression, the Sumerian people experience a renewal. Gudea builds a temple at the direction of the storm god Ningirsu. The temple’s construction and consecration represent the presence of the god’s blessings of abundance among the people, and may indeed have the same “redemptive” implications as Ezekiel’s visionary temple, that of a people rebuilt at long last after devastation by an invader and many years of foreign oppression. For Gudea, the temple is a sign of the divine presence, bringing with it abundance ... In the final chapters of Ezekiel, YHWH , too, partakes of this image of divine abundance associated with water, though to be sure the associations are attenuated and not always clear-cut. For example, in Ezekiel’s second vision of theophany, the sound of God’s voice is compared to the sound of “the voice of mighty waters,” (Ezekiel 43:2). Ezekiel compares this theophany to his first experience many years before, both specifically located by the river Chebar ..."
Sharon, Diane M. A Biblical Parallel to a Sumerian Temple Hymn? Ezekiel 40–48 and Gudea (pp. 99-109) Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society, Vol. 24, No. 1, 1996